(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an access point (AP), a terminal, and a method for performing AP access control in consideration of a congestion level of a transmission channel.
(b) Description of the Related Art
A presently used general-purpose wireless local area network (WLAN) terminal, for example, a laptop computer having a WLAN function and a mobile terminal, i.e., a smart phone having a WLAN function selects an AP to connect in order to use a WLAN service.
In this case, the WLAN terminal selects an AP to connect based on intensity information of a signal that is received from the AP. Therefore, the WLAN terminal does not consider how many terminals are connected within a basic service set (BSS) range that the AP services. Further, the WLAN terminal selects an AP without information on a traffic load level of the AP by traffic that is generated by the connected terminal.
In a case where wireless output signal intensity of the AP is high and a traffic load is high, when the terminal selects a corresponding AP based on only wireless signal intensity, a situation in which smooth service when the terminal attempts to receive cannot be received because of a traffic load that is applied to the AP may occur.
In this way, in a case where the terminal attempts to connect to the AP, when it is determined whether to connect to the AP based on intensity of a signal that is simply transmitted from the AP, although a channel situation of the AP is congested, an additional terminal is connected to the AP and thus a congestion situation may be further aggravated.
Further, a method has been suggested in which, after an AP that is to connect is conventionally preferentially selected by signal intensity from the AP, the AP is again selected according to the number of terminals that are connected to the AP.
However, a problem of the method is that it is does not determine whether a connected terminal is presently being serviced. Further, because the kind of traffic occurring is not determined, for example, whether traffic is voice, simple web surfing, or video streaming, the quantity of traffic that is applied to an AP cannot be estimated.
However, a traffic load that is applied to the AP may be represented in various forms according to the kind of a service that a connection terminal performs.
For example, when an AP operates at 11 Mbps in an 802.11b mode, the number of terminals that can connect for voice over WLAN (VoWLAN) and guarantee appropriate voice quality is 10 or less, but the number of terminals for simple web surfing far surpasses 10.
Therefore, even if only the predetermined number of terminals that are simply connected to one AP are distributed to the predetermined number, traffic that is applied to the AP cannot be appropriately distributed.